Archives for July 2016

Trump adviser Paul Manafort told the Washington Post that Pennsylvania is “wide open,” and that if Trump wins its 20 electoral votes, his path to victory would become “a lot more varied and hers more limited.”

He added: “We can carry Michigan, we can compete in Wisconsin and win. Iowa is in play. If they think they’ve got Colorado, they’re smoking something.”

Manafort went on to describe Connecticut and Oregon — two reliably blue states — as within reach for Trump: “Those are not states that are on my front burner, but she’s going to have to put resources into those states in order to carry them.”

In his first response to a searing charge from bereaved Army father Khizr Khan that he’d “sacrificed nothing” for his country, Donald Trump told ABC News that he had in fact sacrificed by employing “thousands and thousands of people.”

He also suggested that Khan’s wife didn’t speak because she was forbidden to as a Muslim: “I’d like to hear his wife say something.”

And he questioned whether Khan’s words were his own: “Who wrote that? Did Hillary’s script writers write it? I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard.”

Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of intentionally stacking debates against prime time programming to “rig” the election process, despite the fact that the schedule has been set since last September, Politico reports.

Said Trump: “As usual, Hillary and the Dems are trying to rig the debates so two are up against major NFL games. Same as last time w/ Bernie. Unacceptable!”

“To be honest, it’s very possible in my view that Trump wins. I wouldn’t think it’d be by a landslide, but I think he could win. I think he could lose, I think he could lose by a landslide. But, I don’t know which it’s going to be and a lot of that depends on what happens to Hillary Clinton. Is there a meltdown moment, or some implosion of some kind?”

“Democrats marked a decisive turn in their campaign against Donald Trump this week, moving to recast the 2016 race not as a conventional battle between left and right but as a national emergency that requires voters of all stripes to band together against a singularly menacing candidate,” the New York Times reports.

“Abandoning their standard critique against conservative Republicans, allies of Hillary Clinton argued that Mr. Trump was not merely another champion of right-wing ideas, deserving of rejection for his views on the environment or health care.”

“Instead, in an onslaught of astonishing ferocity led by President Obama, they used their convention to portray Mr. Trump as a dangerously unstable figure and a friend of foreign despots like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Some Democrats suggested Mr. Trump might have authoritarian impulses of his own: Prominent in Mrs. Clinton’s acceptance speech Thursday night was a pointed reminder that the American system was designed to prevent the rise of a dictator.”

Politico: “That was the beginning of a 7-minute speech that became an instant sensation—eloquent, emotional and notably original, coming as it did at the end of four days of highly processed political cliche. Khan, a 66-year-old immigration lawyer from Charlottesville, told the story of his son’s death in combat in Iraq, but he turned that elegy into a viral rebuke of Donald Trump: ‘You have sacrificed nothing!'”

“And Khan delivered his broadside without using the teleprompter. There was nothing to put on it, because he had written nothing down.”

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by six points, 41% to 35%, with another 25% picking “other.”

“The presidential tracking poll reflects a slight change of wording from previous surveys, replacing the ‘Neither/Other’ option given to respondents with just ‘Other.’ An internal review had found the word ‘Neither’ has, at times, siphoned support away from one or the other candidate.”

Donald Trump fired back at Hillary Clinton a day after she accused the Republican nominee of being too thin-skinned to have control of the country’s nuclear arsenal, ABC News reports.

Said Trump: “I think I have a great temperament, I have a temperament where I know how to win. She doesn’t know how to win, she’s not a winner. She doesn’t know how to win. And this country, if they choose her, this country will not be in good shape.”

He added: “I’ve had a beautiful, I’ve had a flawless campaign. You’ll be writing books about this campaign.”

Gallup: “Trump’s speech got the least positive reviews of any speech we have tested after the fact: 35% of Americans interviewed last weekend said it was excellent or good. Of the nine previous speeches we have rated, the top one was Barack Obama’s in August 2008, which 58% of Americans rated as excellent or good.”

“Top Donald Trump donors tried to set up a meeting between the GOP presidential nominee and Charles Koch in Colorado Springs on Friday, but Koch aides rejected the entreaties,” Politico reports.

“Koch and his brother David Koch, who helm an influential network of advocacy groups and major conservative donors, have been sharply critical of Trump’s rhetoric and policy stances and have indicated they do not intend to support his campaign.”

Gabriel Sherman: “The morning after Fox News chief Roger Ailes resigned, the cable network’s former director of booking placed a call to the New York law firm hired by 21st Century Fox to investigate sexual-harassment allegations against Ailes. Laurie Luhn told the lawyers at Paul, Weiss that she had been harassed by Ailes for more than 20 years, that executives at Fox News had known about it and helped cover it up, and that it had ruined her life.”

“This is the account of a woman who chose to go along with what Roger Ailes wanted — because he was powerful, because she thought he could help her advance her career, because she was professionally adrift and emotionally unmoored. Doing so helped Luhn’s career for a time — at her peak, she earned $250,000 a year as an event planner at Fox while, according to both her own account and four confirming sources, enjoying Ailes’s protection within the company. But the arrangement required her to do many things she is now horrified by, including luring young female Fox employees into one-on-one situations with Ailes that Luhn knew could result in harassment.”

That was fewer than the 30 million who watched Donald Trump accept the Republican nomination last week.

Hollywood Reporter: “Updated returns for Clinton’s speech, delivered during the 10 o’clock hour on nearly all television networks, offer a tally of 33.3 million viewers from the four broadcast networks and three cablers with coverage. Trump brought in 34.9 million viewers across all nets carrying the speech.”

About Political Wire

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

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